Building Brighter Futures at the College Hill Campus
As the largest inpatient pediatric mental health provider in the country, Cincinnati Children’s continues to expand its offerings to meet increasing needs and improve outcomes for children and families.
The 160,000-square-foot William K. Schubert, MD, Mental Health Center, which opened at the College Hill Campus in 2023, recently celebrated its two-year anniversary. In October, the center unveiled a redesigned green space that features an updated playground, horticulture area, splash pad, labyrinth, and sports field and court.
“Every detail was designed with kids in mind—from the splash pad to the labyrinth,” says Laurel Leslie, MD, MPH, director of the Mental and Behavioral Health Institute. “It’s not just a place to play—it’s a place to heal, grow and feel joy.”
Expanding Access as a Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility
Also this past year, the Mental Health Center launched an advanced level of care to qualify as a Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility. This means the center meets the rigorous standards outlined by OhioRISE (Resilience through Integrated Systems and Excellence), an Ohio Medicaid program designed to support young people with complex behavioral health needs.
As a Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility, the center can now offer comprehensive, trauma-informed inpatient psychiatric services that are covered by Medicaid for eligible patients—expanding access for some of the region’s most vulnerable children and teens.
Preparing Team Members for High-Acuity Care Through Immersive Learning
At the same time, in collaboration, the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Patient Services, and the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology introduced a major, system-level innovation in workforce development: the Behavioral Health Immersive Learning Lab. This multi-divisional initiative is designed to fundamentally transform how direct-care team members are prepared to support patients with the highest-acuity needs in a psychiatric care setting.
“We were experiencing significant staff turnover and burnout among team members caring for patients with complex needs who exhibit challenging behaviors,” says Madeline Aeschbury, BNS, RN, a clinical program manager. “Because of that turnover, we were finding ourselves in this cycle where novice staff members were supporting the highest-acuity patients.”
The severity and complexity of patient presentations were also on the rise. “It became clear that we needed a more rigorous, standardized and immersive approach to training to truly set our team members up for success,” says Allison Zoromski, PhD, a psychologist in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology.
In response, leaders across the two divisions partnered to develop a shared training framework—one that elevates confidence, competence, safety and consistency for teams working with highly acute patients. A donation from the Convalescent Hospital Fund for Children helped bring the vision to life.
Today, Aeschbury and Zoromski co-lead the Behavioral Immersive Learning Lab, which will anchor a multi-week, competency-based curriculum that blends immersive simulation, experiential role-play, virtual reality and skills-based practice. The model aligns closely with the health system’s broader orientation redesign and workforce stabilization strategy, ensuring that new team members begin with a strong foundation while experienced team members receive ongoing development.
Although the physical space is still under construction—with the lab scheduled to open in summer 2026—training has already begun for both new and team members. The simulation experiences enable patient engagement, de-escalation and situational awareness practice in a safe, controlled environment where mistakes become learning opportunities.
When the physical lab opens, it will feature technology-enhanced spaces that mimic real care environments, including an immersive reality room paired with customized virtual-reality scenarios developed in collaboration with Cincinnati Children’s Employee Safety Learning Lab and a design team from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP).
The team also plans to introduce just-in-time training—quick, real-time modules that offer actionable guidance for urgent scenarios, such as managing escalating behaviors. The long-term goal is not only to improve confidence and reduce turnover but to establish a gold standard in pediatric psychiatry training that can be shared across institutions.
“So far, the feedback we’re getting is that the training is helpful and impactful,” Aeschbury says. “Because the need is so high, our intention is to take what we’ve done and keep doing more of it.”
(Published December 2025)
